Title: May you Live in Interesting Times

Author: Aoichibi

Beta: I's That C (revised by CrownsofLaurels)

Genre: Adventure, Fantasy, Humor (I'll try), Drama, angst and a dash o' Tragedy (this is ninja!)

Shipper: none as of yet (no plans for romance whatsoever).

Disclaimer: I do not own any Naruto copyrights. (;.;)

Summary: Life as a ninja should be full of awesome kill-you-with-a-touch jutsu, powerful friends, and awe inspiring battles where the good guys always win, right? Wrong! It has a deceased mother, suicidal father, a rule obsessed bastard of a brother and the war looming over our heads is not helping matters. Survival is the key. Self-Insert.

Author's Notes: Well, prepare yourselves for the mighty cliché, the angst, the tragedy, the drama, the goofiness, the crazy theories of hypothetical stuff, the politics, the fights… or the general life of a ninja as I see it.

- Go read 'Dreaming of Sunshine' by silverqueen, 'Only a Moron' by swabloo, and 'A Cage of Blood and Circumstance' by shadowsdeep. Best Self Insert fanfics out there.

**The image above - used to illustrate this fanfic - is work of jensduchateau and can be founded in his/hers deviantart by the same name. **

Edited in: 13/08/14

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May you live in interesting times.

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A Hatake Life I
Or how the Gods screwed me over.

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The sad thing about life is that it's over before you even know it.

My death would have been comical if I could tell someone about it. I couldn't, or I would end up in a padded cell somewhere. It was just sad. Sad, pathetic and stupid. Who dies being run over by a bicycle anyway?

A bicycle.

A freaking bicycle.

Me, that's who.

It went more or less like this:

It was a rainy, dark night. I was finally going home after my douchebag of a boss decided to let me leave my dull-as-nothing-else job, when an idiot on an out-of-control (and lightless, might I add) bicycle came down the slope. The scene was so surreal, so out of the norm, that my brain couldn't quite compute what I was seeing and I didn't move. I stood still, like a petrified imbecile, letting the machine hurtle violently toward me. I suppose that I hit my head upon collision and cracked my skull on the pavement after the crash because from that point on everything was just… black.

Not the most noteworthy death, I think.

But, after a while, it was not so black anymore.

One of the first things I noticed when I woke up was the cold. Gods, it was so cold. I opened my eyes to see nothing; it was all a big blur; garbled sounds of a language that sounded like gibberish to me and formless, looming, shadowy figures. And then I noticed that I couldn't breathe. My lungs were heavy, something was in them and it hurt, it burned. My veins were on fire, it was like my blood was boiling. I was dizzy, confused, scared and oh gods I was drowning. I couldn't breathe, someone help me! I panicked and screamed.

Well, I suppose that is why no one quite remembers their own birth.

Scary stuff, birth is, especially if you are the one being born.

That's right, I was reborn. Reincarnation maybe? Cosmic joke? I didn't know then, and I still don't know even decades later, but I was sure that someone up there with the higher powers was laughing their ass off at my misfortune. They didn't even have the decency to erase my memories, no that would be far too great of a mercy. I was a 23 year old college student locked in the body of an infant having my damned cloth diapers changed and being breast fed.

Breast fed. Have you ever tasted mother's milk?

And my new parents wondered why I preferred the bottle so much.

Not. Funny.

Oddly enough I didn't remember my first few months of life in this new world very well; it was all very fuzzy and blurry. Like I was stuck in a haze or something. What I could remember well from my earliest memories of those boring days with nothing more to do than cry-eat-cry-poop-cry-sleep rewind and repeat, was the strange feeling of the warm stuff which coursed through my body. Every time I turned my attention inward and 'poked' and 'prodded' at that warmth it would give me a rush, a sensation like a sugar high, turning me into a cooing and giggling mass of high-as-a-kite infant for what seemed like hours. At least 'mother' was quite happy on those occasions. I was one happy baby.

One of those times I was playing with it, I tried to move it to specific locations, like my cold feet, for example (hadn't these people ever heard of socks?). Soon, I stumbled upon a strange discovery, as if this whole being reborn situation was not weird enough; there were two different types of 'warm stuff' in me. I thought I was a mutant. I kept praying, 'please don't let me be blue and furry' for months because I didn't had the dexterity to raise my head and look in a mirror or the focused vision to interpret the shapes I would see.

But back to the more important, non-completely-crazy stuff.

One part was light and easy to manipulate. It gave off that cozy, warm feeling and I had much more of this one than the other. Oddly enough, it gave me the impression that it was blue. I promptly named it 'warm blue stuff.' Yeah, I am that creative. Sue me.

The other was heavier, denser, and harder to play with and it gave me the sensations of pinpricks on my skin, as if I'd had a whole liter of coffee. It flowed roughly through my veins and not as fast as the Blue one, and every time I tried to use it, I would end up with an adrenaline rush of such proportions that I was certain could not be healthy for a baby of my age. It gave off impressions of wildness, fierceness, untamed power and blinding bright white light. It was difficult to work with and took a lot more time, more concentration, and even more giggling, but I succeeded in manipulating it, a little bit, anyway. Apparently, lots of time on your hands and the same wooden ceiling to stare at day in and out can inspire infants with adult memories to prior unheard of levels of concentration. Anything to save ones sanity really. Following my new, and oh so creative and inspired, trend, I named it 'warm white stuff'.

Later, I made the educated deduction that the 'warm white stuff and the warm blue stuff' were actually chakra.

As time passed, my body grew, my ears opened, and my vision became clear. Unfortunately, it was also as time passed that I came to find that I was screwed three ways to Sunday.

When I was first taken out by 'father' for a sun bath in the early morning light, what I saw almost gave me a heart attack. Yep, ladies and gentlemen, that was not Mount Rushmore up there missing a head and I was not in Kansas anymore. Although considering what I now knew, there probably was a little dog around here somewhere to which I could cling. Pity I couldn't see them at that time.

I was thrilled at what I saw, and what I realized it meant. I was a ninja. An honest-to-god walking-up-the-walls-and-breathing-fire-mud-wind-lava-and-who-knows-what-the-fuck-else freaking ninja. And to top it all off, I had been born, or reborn as it was, in the best shinobi village to have ever existed. Konohagakure.

I was living a dream!

I was an idiot.

After that fantastic 'I'm a ninja' freak out, when I was about five, maybe six?, months old, or at least, I think I was roughly that old, days were a difficult thing to count when the only thing you did was sleep, a team of three pre-teens and an adult came to our home. Based on my previous knowledge of my new universe, I could deduce that this had to be a genin team.

The sight of the team of three pre-teens and an adult decked in ninja gear sent shiver down my spine. Because if they were here it meant that my parents were going away for an untold period of time.

And that lead to the indignity of…

Babysitting.

Being babysat by a genin team was a bigger annoyance than I had words to describe. The trio of pre-pubescent idiots never took their jobs seriously. Honestly in all my years as a ninja I have yet to see a genin team treat a babysitting mission with the gravity it deserves. It was a precursor to a, normally B-rank, bodyguard mission. And so it was important damn it.

The trio present that day was no different from any other. The three brats quarreled amongst themselves. The girl generally made goo-goo eyes to her team mates or her sensei, mostly the sensei. The boys typically argued about Gods only knew what, I didn't fucking care, and the girl tried to make them shut the hell up and, red faced, looked to her sensei for approval.

Pathetic.

The poor Jounin bastard of the week was slouching on the couch with a bored look and pointedly ignoring the mess his students were making around him and keeping a sleepy eye on the corner with me and my brother.

Speaking of the spike haired boy beside me, he hated being babysat. My cute older-younger brother made a point to make a mess of everything he could, finger painting the floor, throwing fruit at the walls, dragging dirt, and other unidentified things into the house just to make the annoyingly loud brats clean it up when they finally noticed his antics. Meanwhile, he'd do his best to make them look, and feel, stupid with the things that he said. Like that time when he corrected, or at least I think he did, a too-full of himself (by the way he was puffing out his chest, like an over inflated balloon) boy's hand seal, all the while talking to him in an annoyed tone. I so wished I could understand what he was saying back then.

And I pitied the idiots who tried to get anywhere near me.

One time, one of the girls pinched me a bit with her arm armor as she held me, not paying attention to what she was doing and distracted by her teammates. I cried out in pain and the next thing I knew Kakashi was attacking the girl with a rubber kunai, all silent, furious angry toddler-genius. I was quickly passed to their sensei and the three genin were chased about the property by my wrathful sibling. It was pretty entertaining to see three supposedly lethal killers flee for their lives in the face of my brother's, a two year old toddler (his birthday had been only a few weeks ago and the cake had a candle with the number 2, I took my conclusions from that), uncontrolled fury. The sensei made no move to save his students, but did seem a bit perturbed by my loud cackling. After that incident, brother didn't let any of the kids near me, only their sensei should I need something from an adult which required me to be picked up and held (like diaper changing, urg). He even preferred to be the one to feed me my bottle.

Yeah, my brother was protective even that young. Honestly, overprotective wasn't even the word, more like obsessively possessive. Then again it wasn't like I had room to talk I'm just as bad.

One day, when I had not seen 'father' for days, which was nothing new as the man spent more time out of than in the house-sometimes we could go weeks on end without seeing him. Mother came down the stairs with her short, solid silver, untamable mass of hair, dressed in a, closed, Jounin or Chunin uniform (what is the blasted difference anyway? The damn jackets are identical.). It was a bit different from what I fuzzily remember of the anime, the green vest was more bulky and had fewer pockets, and she didn't wear the blue sweater-like thing underneath it which left her shoulders bare. And the metal of her headband was stitched on a pristine white cloth, same color as the elbow length gloves, arm guards and loose pants. It all made a good contrast with her light tanned skin. But how she managed to keep all that white clean was beyond me. Pure skill I think.

My older brother was perched on her hip. Poor kid always looked like he had stuck his hand in a plug socket, the way his hair defied gravity. If the gods had any mercy on me at all, they would spare me the indignity of being a female with that hair.

As if.

She talked some to our visitors, giving them a few sheets of paper. Then she put the toddler near me in the padded playpen that took up most of the space in the corner of the living room and looked at us with those warm and pretty bluish gray eyes of hers. She said something in a ridiculous baby-version of that language that I still could not understand, kissed both of us on our heads, and left through the window.

That was the last time I would see 'mother.'

The funeral of 'mother,' Hatake Naomi (and I use the term "funeral" lightly because there was not a piece of her left to be cremated) took place a few days later. A masked guy, ANBU, delivered a white scroll; tied with a black piece of cloth, to 'father'. I eventually discovered that while returning from an infiltration mission in Suna, enemies had ambushed her. 'Mother' still finished whatever she was supposed to be doing because in her ninja file her last mission was listed as completed, even if no one, not even enemies, or so said the files, survived the encounter to tell the tale.

I would learn otherwise almost two decades later and relish in finishing what my 'mother' started with her own techniques, showing the fucking bastard just what happened when you pissed off a ninja of my rank by insulting their 'mothers'.

Fucking doll playing bastard I hope he rots in hell for eternity.

But that didn't change the fact that mother was still nothing more than a few pretty symbols engraved on a piece of polished rock and a head band with dog tags stuck to a tree. That day was also the day that my rose tinted dream came crashing down on my head and I realized that ninja life was not fun and games and that people died here. Gruesomely. Messily. Lonely. Leaving important people behind that didn't quite know what to do with themselves. That being painfully illustrated by 'father' who got roaring drunk for three days straight until a strange old lady came to our house and literally slapped some sense into him.

I didn't want that for me. I didn't want to fight nor to be left behind. But I didn't have that much of a choice. The third great ninja war was coming, and I would be right in the front lines of it.

My name is now Hatake Mitsuki, younger sister of Kakashi, aka "Oni-tan," daughter of Sakumo, aka the White Fang of Konoha.

I'm 8 months and a few days old, and my dream is live to see old age, and this is my fucked up story.

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To be continued…

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A/N: So any thoughts you guys want to share? Review